Phlux

Jun. 1, 2003.

Time to embrace techno-music tourism

BEN RAYNER

This is a tale of three cities.

Two of them have recognized the value of the 20th century's last great cultural movement and embraced, nurtured and — in the more positive sense of the word — exploited it to international acclaim. The third has shunned it like the proverbial red-headed stepchild, institutionalized its dismantling and botched yet another opportunity to register the "world class" standing it has always desperately craved.

It's not the time to pick on Toronto, I know, when our poor town is reeling from a renewed grapple with the SARS outbreak we'd all hubristically declared "over" a week or so ago. The city council is actually managing to become more of a corrupt, laughably ineffectual shambles with each passing day and the summer smog has already descended to stain the sky a putrid shade of yellow.

Nevertheless, a couple of recent, techno-related trips out of town have left me feeling a bit nostalgic for the days, not very long ago, when Toronto could lay claim to being one of the liveliest destinations on the global electronic-music circuit, before the Fun Police and a fickle public threw our formerly thriving scene into a permanent state of uncertain restructuring.

It's not that the various breeds of dance music and their many technologically tuned-in derivatives are dead in this city or have even been driven completely back underground, although the thousands-strong raves that used to dominate the weekend party schedule are certainly in rare supply. But the audience for electronic music in these parts has taken a serious hit in numbers, and the scale of Toronto's parties and club events has contracted accordingly. Likewise, the international buzz on Toronto as the de facto locus of the North American rave movement and a hopping drum 'n' bass town second only to London, England, in scale has faded while other cities — Montreal, for one, here in Canada — take up the slack.

As you read this, Montreal's third annual Mutek Festival will be wrapping up a five-day program of forward-thinking sounds that's become one of the most well-regarded stops on the global electronic-music itinerary. I, meanwhile, will be trying to piece together what's left of my brain and my hearing after my second brush in eight days with Windsor-based techno DJ/producer Richie Hawtin — whose label, Minus, hosted a Mutek showcase at Montreal's Metropolis club on Friday night.

The first encounter came two Thursdays ago, at a full-throttle party Hawtin threw in Ann Arbor, Mich., to coincide with Detroit's massive Movement Festival, a free three-day electronic-music event that the city, the acknowledged birthplace of techno, has thrown on the shores of the Detroit River for the past four Memorial Day weekends.

Formerly the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, the party went on this year despite the retraction of city funding, a dispute between the Detroit electronic-music community and the festival's former producers, , and seat-of-the-pants programming that gracious observers have euphemistically characterized as "last minute." Despite little advance notice on the lineup, limited promotion, the absence of corporate sponsorship and a noticeable scaling back in size, tens of thousands — a good number of them from out of town and overseas — thronged the outdoor stages at Hart Plaza all weekend.

Whatever the final fiscal tally, Movement — which, as one might expect for a free festival, has failed to turn a profit in previous years — in 2003 was, from a fan's perspective, a complete success. The lineup, heavy on Motown techno heavyweights such as Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills, Kenny Larkin and Stacey Pullen (whose raging set last Sunday night was the weekend's highlight), was easily the finest the event has fielded since its jubilant inaugural year.

Not bad, considering Movement only went on because of the 11th-hour organizational and financial chutzpah of first-wave techno "innovator"-turned-artistic director Derrick May and his mates Saunderson and Carl Craig, who took over running the DEMF when the City of Detroit backed out earlier this year and left the whole thing in limbo.

Toronto, for its part, has nothing — as Uncle Monty, the failed stage actor in Withnail & I might put it — but vintage wine and memories.

The city's council-led war on raves — which, after months of inflated anti-drug hysteria and unfounded police claims of violence and guns at dance events, led to a city-wide ban on raves on public property in 2000 — officially ended shortly after the huge iDance rally and free party in Nathan Phillips Square made a 20,000-strong pro-rave show of force that summer. Yet the persecution of promoters continues less overtly in the form of burdensome licensing and security demands from police and civic authorities, and many party organizers have since concluded that it's no longer worth the money or the hassle to continue. Even iDance, which briefly had a chance of becoming Toronto's annual equivalent to something like the DEMF or the more rarefied, audience-specific Mutek, petered out after its second year due to soaring costs and a paucity of city and corporate funding.

Parties still go off, albeit more quietly and surreptitiously than they did in the days when they'd fill cavernous venues like the CNE's Better Living Centre. Club nights are still packed, although bringing a big-name DJ or two to town is rarely the sure thing it was four or five years ago. Local DJs and producers such as Adam Marshall, Jake Fairley, Kenny Glasgow and Suction Records' Solvent and Lowfish — to name a few of my favourites — are thriving. Party promoters such as Fukhouse, Wabi, Promise and the laudable Om Festival crew (two more weeks!) maintain modest but reverently loyal followings.

In many ways, the present-day electronic-music scene in Toronto is preferable to what it was during the big-rave boom years. It's more mature and manageable, more focused on music than profit and less overrun by trend-hoppers and sketched-out crystal kids. But, in becoming more segmented and insular, it's also lost a lot of the old ability to awe with its capacity to unite huge numbers of otherwise disparate people in their love of music and dancing. That's a loss.

Given the city's current, frantic drive to lure SARS-wary tourists to town with cheap baseball tickets and all-star concerts, it's also highly ironic that just four years ago Mayor Mel Lastman was publicly registering his horror that raves were attracting a supposedly undesirable out-of-town element to Toronto. The joke's on Mel. Now Torontonians are more likely to head to a city like Detroit for a party than the other way around.

Or to Bobcaygeon, for that matter. The tiny Ontario town that unleashed OPP roadblocks and a legal injunction to keep Destiny Productions' 10-year-old World Electronic Music Festival from going on in its midst in 2001 will this August welcome the three-day party back for the third year in a row. It appears businesses there, like businesses in Montreal and Detroit, have cottoned on to the economic benefits of having several thousand electronic-music fans come to town — and to the fact that civilized society can indeed endure an occasional encounter with the children of rave. Imagine that.

Phlux

I think Ben Raynor makes a lot of good points. Toronto is a very narrow minded town. We had a great thing going here for a while. Toronto had one of the best, if not the best Rave Scene in the world. But what happened? We let the scene go down the toilet.. The public and the media condemed it, and then the cops and our stupid city council disposed of it.

It seems everytime the opportunity comes up for Toronto to become recognized as a world class city we shun it and find excuses to get rid of it. We all sat around and bitched about the olympics; how bad it would for the city. Meanwhile, Sydney is one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world right now while nobody wants to come anywhere near Toronto.

kreggz

There are always ways to circumnavigate the fun police, and by laws, and whatever else. The fact is that the desire to build and maintain the scene is just not there in Toronto. Here in MTL, we are wagin the same battlez, city councillors that wanna close down the after hours, police raiding/shutting down parties, ya know what folks, this is nothing new, its been happening as long as electronic music parties have been. Sometimes sure it is more en vigueur, but it just means we need to see the return to the underground, the return of small intimate loft parties, of meeting places, etc. We can maintain our scene, we just have to WANT to!
True dat tho, that here at least they have seen the value of the tourist/raver $$, and that is why you see more electronic muzic fests, (Mutek, Cream, Black & Blue, Wet n Wild, Bal en Blanc etc.), but there are just as many politics and bad vibes surroundin our scene here as there are in Tdot, (a few big, *sic* reputable parties were shut down last year night of) somehow it still seems to manage. (Vive the megacity and lack of coordination) Anyway, not to say I disagree completely far from it, but just to say that things aren't so rosey here in the MTL electronic / political spectrum either.

Peace

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GooD tings gro in shit!

DynamicHalfDuo

Some very interesting points, and a noticeable pro-rave slant... from a rave publication, I presume?

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Nocturnal Commissions - Hardcore with a Smile

kreggz

which publication does that come in??

Phlux

The Toronto Star I believe..